Mapping Business Strategies and Talent Management Strategies

Talent mapping is a technique that charts individuals’ skills and abilities, assesses their performance and potential, and matches them with workforce planning strategies to balance an organization’s talent and needs. Talent mapping enables an organization to determine strategies for future hiring, including internal promotions, likely short- and long-term hiring needs, and development of existing talent to meet future staffing needs.

Talent mapping is a strategic service that is used by businesses to plan for short-, medium- and long-term talent acquisition. It is used by the most perceptive companies to ensure that a recruitment process doesn’t just result in a quick hire, but rather, that it focuses on the short, medium and long term needs and leads to a number of strategic talent acquisitions over a prolonged period of time. It enables business leaders to proactively build the capabilities of the workforce using an in-depth and analytical process. It involves identifying the capabilities, experience and potential of current employees and aligning those with the growth strategy to reveal talent gaps and development needs.

The Performance-Potential Matrix

When companies engage in talent mapping, they often use a nine-box grid called the performance-potential matrix to assess their current employees. This matrix measures aspects of performance and potential such as leadership, effectiveness at the current position, impact, and trust.

Utilizing the matrix gives HR professionals a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of current employees, as well as their potential to grow or be promoted into other positions in the future. This information can then be used to find out what talent gaps exist in the organization, which can help with hiring both now and in the future.

Making Talent Mapping Easier

The process of talent mapping takes a great deal of time and effort. Thrive TRM can assist with the talent mapping process by facilitating the record-keeping it entails. Thrive tracks notes, makes it easy to automatically incorporate those notes into employee profiles, and creates reports based on data users’ input into the system.

With Thrive TRM, you can compile a profile of your company’s current staffing situation and better determine your future hiring needs. This information can then be shared with your entire hiring team and any members of management that want to be in the loop.

Another capability offered with Thrive TRM is feedback and assessment. Your hiring and management teams can use Thrive TRM to have an ongoing dialogue about the company’s talent management strategy without the difficulties of scheduling meetings and trying to get everyone together at the same time.

The information that is gleaned from the talent mapping process can then be used in recruiting and hiring efforts to make sure your organization’s ongoing needs are being met in the candidates you hire. Thrive TRM streamlines recruiting and hiring and contributes to a comprehensive talent management strategy.

Reasons why talent mapping is essential for strategic growth.

Inclusive employee engagement

Talent mapping is principally an internal process used to assess current and future effectiveness, involving the entire organisation across every level and function. While much of the ‘assessment’ is passive and metrics driven e.g. clarifying the technical knowledge, qualifications and performance of individual employees it also presents a perfect opportunity for employee engagement. It’s another touch point, where career conversations take place and qualitative data of employee goals and interests are gathered and compared with growth strategy and future investment. Building trust and raising morale are two likely outcomes of any employee engagement initiative, especially when the focus is on understanding and potentially fulfilling career aspirations.

Opportunities for internal moves

The most effective talent mapping approach mobilises the whole organisation to record the capabilities, experience and potential of each employee. Only a non-silo mentality will ensure consistent data collection, as well as the detail required to inform talent decisions. According to accountancy firm PwC, compiling a skills and attributes database is a great way to ensure the right people are assigned to the right roles and for selecting which talent can be moved internally to meet short-term business demands. This, on the one hand, is a proactive way to bolster teams so they can deal with sudden changes in priorities and market conditions or pre-empt vacancies and manage talent shortage risks. It can also create new opportunities for internal moves, by revealing skill shortages not previously identified. Training needs, too, are highlighted and training solutions delivered to ensure positions are filled, where gaps emerge.

Identify potential leavers

Reviewing employee performance and potential isn’t just about identifying talent gaps and training needs within the workforce. Talent mapping can also uncover signs someone may soon leave an organisation, or that it’s time for them to move on to a new opportunity. First of all, taking the time to investigate the tangible impact of employees is always a good idea. Once you’re clear about this, you can then assess the potential each person has to progress or evolve within the organisation, over time. The 9 box grid is a popular talent mapping tool, as it helps leaders visualise where employees sit on a matrix and clarify whether a degree of motivation, reward or training will help them develop their careers.

Succession Planning

Succession planning is, of course, a primary objective for any talent mapping exercise. Traditionally, talent mapping processes would only seek to highlight people with leadership potential and ensure only those people were given access to development opportunities. As discussed earlier, though, the focus of development programmes has shifted from engaging with ‘high potential’ leaders to recognising that every employee should have access to career growth trajectories. Talent mapping, in this context, is about broadening your perception of the ‘critical roles’ within the organisation and understanding how those roles could be filled if vacancies emerged. It also encourages the establishment of clear development pathways, whether the function is a ‘specialist’ or leadership position, thereby challenging ‘invested in’ employees to step into and/or create new opportunities for themselves.

Reducing the time to hire

The previous sections each considered the benefits of talent mapping from an internal perspective. Of course, in an ideal world, all talent needs could be solved internally, but that’s rarely the case for most organisations. Rather than being caught out when a vacancy arises, external talent mapping is another valuable method to ensure organisations gain a competitive people advantage.

Long view of talent development

Underpinning any internal mobility or succession planning process is the need to develop talent over a long time. Whether that’s broadening or narrowing someone’s experience, talent mapping is a great way to identify specific needs or speculate about unknown future ones and how they may be met through training and development. Leaders often start by reviewing current and future workforce potential. Though, during the last decade, more organisations are using talent mapping to identify critical jobs of the future and determining what skills they will require in five- or ten-years’ time, to fulfil these roles.

External Brand building

In the same way that internal talent mapping can lead to better employee engagement, regularly engaging with external talent either directly or through a talent mapping service provider can improve employer brand and generally raise the reputation of an organisation.

To attract talent today, companies must ensure that all potential candidates enjoy positive experiences of the brand. Many companies, for example, now participate in talent community building, utilising ongoing networking and other marketing touch points to ensure their brand remains ‘top-of-mind’ for prospective candidates. When the company is ready to launch a recruitment campaign, it’s already one step ahead of its competition, in a tight talent market.

Gather Market intelligence

Gathering market intelligence and insight into competitor capabilities is a key objective of an external talent mapping process. Once an internal talent map identifies gaps and potential future gaps that could emerge, it becomes a foundation to analyse organisations, industries and people on an on-going basis. This can involve comparing, for example, the make-up of competitor teams and organisational structures, investigating compensation and benefits trends, as well as training and development plans. Stock-piling this intelligence can give businesses a detailed and holistic view of the market for talent, increasing the chances of hiring the absolute best candidates. It enables decisive hiring, while building a clear foundation for succession planning.

Trend analysts suggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data is fuelling innovation in recruitment technology, creating more sophisticated optimisation and data analytics tools that can be leveraged for talent mapping exercises. And companies that invest wisely in the best tools and consultants, will position themselves at the forefront of the industry.